The Business Plans Handbook is updated every few years; each volume includes roughly 20 business plans of about 10 pages. These business plans were compiled by entrepreneurs seeking funding for small business start-ups in the U.S. and Canada. Samples of businesses in volume 13 include a barbecue sauce manufacturer, a fitness center, a technology solutions provider, and a campus apartment complex.

Historical Stock Prices:

Yahoo! Finance: Historical prices for stocks, mutual funds and exchange traded funds are accessible through this free web site as far back as 1962 (each stock will vary in length of coverage). Prices are adjusted for splits and dividends.

> enter your stock or fund's ticker symbol in the search box. If you do not know the ticker symbol, use the "Symbol Lookup" feature. > click on "Get Quotes" > select "Historical Prices" from the left hand column to see full list of stock prices.

Big Charts: Raw historical stock prices (not adjusted for splits and dividends) are available through this free web site.

> At the top of the screen select "Historical Quotes." > Enter the ticker symbol, or if you do not know the symbol use "Global Symbol Lookup" to locate your company's symbol. This search box appears at the top of the page. > After having retrieved your desired ticker symbol and selected "Historical Quotes" you will be asked to enter a date in mm/dd/yy format. > Enter the date and select "lookup"

In the case of companies that have changed ticker symbols, merged, been acquired or gone out of business, finding daily stock price closings is more complicated; sources such as Yahoo! Finance and Big Charts typically do not accommodate this kind of stock price search. If a stock cannot be located through these sources, a possible source would be a newspaper index such as this:

Enter the name of an exchange (New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, etc.) in the search box and then enter the date for which you need the stock quote in the "On this date" box. The results of these searches may vary depending on the date being searched, but in most cases you will retrieve several entries, one of which will be the daily quotes from that particular exchange.

Stock Information:

Value Line offers one-page analyses of 1,750 publicly-traded companies. Information included: financial data; ratios; forecasts on financials & ratios; line of business; analyst information; quarterly sales, EPS, and dividends; capital structure; rankings for timeliness, safety, beta, price projections, insider & institutional decisions; and a long term price chart. The most recent 6 months of Value Line are kept on the Business Shelves behind the Reference Desk on the first floor of Rivera Library.

Mutual Funds:

Morningstar, the best-known source for mutual fund information, provides detailed reviews for nearly 2,000 mutual funds, plus commentary on the outlook for funds in different market sectors. The UCR library keeps the most recent two years of Morningstar in print.

The print version of Morningstar features one-page reviews of mutual funds, which include historical performance information, a list of top holdings, a review of the fund from one of Morningstar's analysts, and a 1-through-5-star rating.

Morningstar groups its reviews into categories based on the kind of mutual fund. Main categories include Domestic (U.S) stock, International Stock, Balanced, Taxable Bond, and Municipal Bond. Within these categories, funds are grouped into more specific groupings. For instance, for Domestic Stock, sub-categories include Large-Cap Value, Large-Cap Blend, Large-Cap Growth, Mid-Cap Value, Small-Cap Growth, etc.

Mutual funds can also be researched through article databases. Some of the most useful include: